2 posts tagged with GallowsBallads.
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New book: 20 execution songs from Victorian London.
PlanetSlade's fourth book is out today. It collects all my Gallows Ballads and Bushranger Ballads essays into this volume, and added some bonus material. Sold at chaotic public hangings, these lurid songs described the condemned man’s crime and warned spectators not to follow his example. Many claimed to set out the killer’s own confession – his “last goodnight” – placing these verses atop their own blood-soaked account of exactly what he’d done. Celebrity hangings, like that of Frederick and Maria Manning in 1849, produced many rival ballad sheets and total sales of well over two million copies [more inside]
Corkery’s Farewell (1875): a Peaky Blinders ballad.
The term “Peaky Blinders” was still a decade away from being coined when Jeremiah Corkery and his thuggish mates murdered a Birmingham policeman called William Lines in March 1875. But it's only the name they lacked. Corkery's execution four months after the killing produced at least two songs about him and a great deal of press coverage lamenting the lawless state of the Victorian city's streets. PlanetSlade’s latest gallows ballads essay has the full story, plus a look at how the real Peakies differed sharply from their TV counterparts. [more inside]
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